Architects of Emortality (42 page)

“Walter Czastka died of natural causes,” Hal told her. “The death certificate makes conventional reference to general neuronal failure, which usually means that the nanotech patchwork holding the hindbrain together couldn’t maintain the feedback loops necessary to sustain motor function.” “Usually?” Charlotte queried.

“Regina says that the wastage in Czastka’s brain was more extensive than usual, and more evident in the cerebrum.” “What does that imply?” “In Regina’s words: ‘If you set aside all the jargon, he just gave up on himself and faded out.’ There’s no hard evidence in his own files to prove that in 2322 he carried out a series of illegal genetic manipulations on egg cells which had been taken from Maria Inacio’s unexpectedly active womb and fertilized by his own spermatozoa, but I’ve dipped into the private files of those officers of Wollongong University who could have been involved in hushing it up. There’s more than enough buried there to support Wilde’s conjectures. I’m still excavating it, but all bureaucrats tend to be careful in the maintenance of their private records, however fast and loose they play with official documents.

Given that Czastka’s death wasn’t suspicious, there’s no need for us to publish our findings, but I’ve found sufficient confirmation of the factual allegations contained in Moreau’s scroll to be sure that they’re true.” “Information which, being good bureaucrats, we’ll naturally commit to our own records, for the edification of future excavators,” Charlotte said.

Hal didn’t rise to that. “I have hard evidence of the peripheral involvement of at least twelve others in Czastka’s experiment. All of them, including the murder victims, are commemorated in the faces of the monkeys on Moreau’s island; none are still alive. That’s not to say that it was an organized conspiracy; Czastka appears to have recruited them as and when he needed them, and it’s probable that none of them knew exactly how many others were involved, or how.

The scroll left behind by Gustave Moreau is based on hearsay, of course, but it confirms that Maria Inacio knew more than anyone else—except Walter himself—about the progress of the experiment and the subsequent cover-up.

Moreau’s account of what she told him confirms the private notes made by the dean of Walter’s faculty and the assistant registrar who arranged the transfer of the embryo from her womb to the artificial one.

“There’s no detailed map of the transformations that Walter carried out on the embryo formed from the ovum he took from Inacio’s womb and combined with his own sperm, but he was definitely trying to engineer it for longevity. It’s explicitly stated that he worked at several of the key loci to which Zaman later applied his own transformations. We’ll never know how close he came to succeeding, but he would have been extremely lucky to hit on the right substitutions first time out, without the benefit of the preparatory animal work that Zaman and his peers were able to do.” “If he’d succeeded,” Charlotte observed, “we might now be attributing the New Human Race to the Czastka transformation.” “But he didn’t.” “The photographs of Jafri Biasiolo in different phases of his career as Rappaccini that you showed Wilde when I first brought him in suggest that what Czastka did must have had some effect,” Charlotte reminded him. “If he’d carried on—if he’d kept track of Biasiolo and tried again—it would have been hard going; but he might have given us the New Human Race fifty or sixty years earlier than Ali Zaman.” “If he’d carried on in the 2320s,” Hal opined, “he’d have ended up like Michi Urashima: a sacrifice to the forces of convention. He’d have ended up in the freezer, while the masters of the MegaMall divided the work up into manageable packets and made sure the transformations were properly tested on animals before they started work on dismantling the legal restraints. They’d have been right to do it. These things have to be properly managed. We’re not living in the twentieth century.” “The spin-off from Michi Urashima’s pioneering efforts wasn’t properly managed, though,” Charlotte pointed out. “Not the bits that Rappaccini took it upon himself to carry forward, at any rate.” “From now on,” Hal judged, “they will be.” “Does the scroll explain why Moreau did it?” Charlotte asked curiously. She was still harboring the faint hope that Oscar Wilde might have got it completely wrong and that Moreau’s madness had not been quite as divine as Wilde insisted.

“It does include some teasing comments about the ethics of scientific research, and a slighting reference to the quality of Walter Czastka’s artistry, but there’s no detailed explanation of Moreau’s motives. He seems to have decided to carry the final solution to the mystery to his grave—unless, of course, he had such perfect trust in Wilde’s skills as a detective that he was content to leave that side of the matter to him. Fortunately, I’m not required to include speculations as to motive in my own report.” “The news tapes won’t be content with that,” Charlotte observed wryly. “The vidveg always want to know Why? “The news-tape mongers won’t give a damn what we say or don’t say, so long as they have the charismatic Dr. Wilde to supply all the lurid fantasies they need, and a few more besides.” “What about the court?” Charlotte asked.

“It won’t get to court,” Hal told her. “Once the psychologists and neurophysiologists have completed their reports, all charges against the woman will be dropped. There’s no doubt that she wasn’t in control of her own actions; she doesn’t even have any memory of what happened. She’s the Robot Assassins’ worst nightmare—but however reckless Moreau may have been in other respects, he certainly did his best to make sure that his chief pawn came through it all. It seems that she’ll make a full recovery.” “She’ll simply walk free, then?” “Not exactly. She’ll be quietly given into the custody of the Secret Masters of the MegaMall. Not as a prisoner, of course, but as a valued employee. They’ll pay her whatever salary she requires in exchange for her full cooperation.

There’s a great deal they can learn from her, or so they hope. It’s dangerous knowledge—but it’ll be even more dangerous if others decide to follow in Moreau’s footsteps and we don’t have the means to prevent them.” Charlotte thought about that for a few moments. In the long run, the entire Moreau affair might come to be seen as mere window dressing for the proof that it was possible to make brainfeed equipment that would turn humans into mere robots. That knowledge would now be entrusted to the Hardinist Cabal—but were they safe custodians? And if not them, then who? She realized that the repercussions of this remarkable series of incidents would extend over centuries—and that she, Charlotte Holmes, had been privileged to see the whole drama unfold from the best seat in the house.

If only she had been able to play a more active part… “Walter Czastka could have offered his talent and his enterprise to the Ahasuerus Foundation,” Charlotte pointed out when she had decided that she needed more time to mull over the other matter. “If he didn’t want to set himself so far outside the mainstream of scientific research, he could at least have given them what he had and pointed their people in the right direction.

Instead, he decided to cultivate his and everyone else’s gardens: not merely to make flowers, but to make flowers to make money. Not only did he refuse to become an Ali Zaman, he even refused to become an Oscar Wilde. Not, apparently, the kind of role model that young Jafri was looking for when Maria Inacio turned up on his doorstep claiming to be his mother and volunteering to tell him everything.” “We don’t have to speculate,” Hal reminded her.

“No,” she admitted, “but it’s difficult to avoid it, isn’t it? The fact that his mother went and drowned herself—deliberately or not—can’t have helped young Jafri to come to terms with his inheritance. It did make him unique, though.

From that moment on, he must have been very conscious of the fact that there was nobody else in the world quite like him. I can imagine how it might have preyed on his mind. Whom the gods destroy, they first make mad, according to Euripides.” “That’s a terrible habit you’ve picked up from Wilde,” Hal complained, referring to her use of the classical quotation.

“If, by the gods, one means the vicissitudes of chance and circumstance,” Charlotte went on unrepentantly, “then we all stand on the brink of destruction: every one of us who is not a Natural. Some of us are two hundred years old, others merely twenty, but we’re all doomed. Oscar Wilde thinks I ought to be even more fiercely resentful of that fact than he is, because my foster parents actually had the choice of going for the more expensive option and paying for my admission to the New Human Race. Wilde’s parents didn’t—and whatever Jafri Biasiolo chose to think, neither did his. Perhaps it’s just youth that prevents me from plumbing the depths of disappointment that claimed both Wilde and his good friend Rappaccini. Perhaps, in due course, the news of my destruction will actually come home to me. Tell me, Hal—how mad are you? And how long will your sanity last, while we two grow old in a world where the gradually increasing majority of our contemporaries stay young?” “We’re policemen,” Hal reminded her. “We’re the ones who are supposed to help keep the mad ones in check. Rappaccini and Wilde haven’t done us any favors there.” “We’re policemen,” Charlotte agreed. “We’re the ones who are supposed to make sure that the Gustave Moreaus and Michi Urashimas of this world keep their follies at home and their sins in virtual reality. But are we doing the world any favors?” “I think so,” Hal answered without hesitation.

“It’s a living, I suppose,” she conceded. “It’ll keep us occupied until we die, if we want it to. But Oscar Wilde was right about something else too. I won’t want to be a policeman all my life. Life’s too short, you see, for the likes of us.” “You can’t win them all,” said Hal philosophically, “no matter how closely you rub shoulders with the biggest winners there are. You have to play the hand you’re dealt by fate, as cleverly as you can.” “That’s exactly what Jafri Biasiolo must have thought,” said Charlotte, determined to have the last word, “and I suppose that’s exactly what he did, in his own peculiar fashion.” Having completed his report, Michael Lowenthal looked anxiously around the virtual conference room, trying to measure the response. There were thirteen men and women whose representative sims were arranged about the illusory table, seven of whom he did not yet know by name. Their images were as obsessively minimalist as the “room” in which they were gathered; they looked perfectly human and perfectly ordinary, except for a slight gloss that might have been a reflection of the light that bounced up at them from the polished tabletop.

According to those elements of the Hidden Archive which had so far been opened to Michael’s inquiries, there had been a time when the Secret Masters had donned all manner of gaudy raiment in order to conduct their board meetings. They had delighted in appearing to one another as gods and demons, monsters and mirror-men, and they had met at the summits of virtual peaks higher by far than the meager mountains of Earth’s crumpled crust—but that had been in the early days of their power. Now they dressed more fittingly, not out of humility but to emphasize that their assemblies were straightforwardly utilitarian, merely a matter of business.

Virtual environments were now the arena of all the most cherished dreams of humankind—every impossible adventure, every bizarre fetish, every body of knowledge, every shameful desire—but the Dominant Shareholders liked to remember that virtual space was first and foremost the repository of the world’s wealth.

It was where money was, and it was where stewardship of the earth was exercised with scrupulous care. Michael knew that this imagistic room was more securely cloaked than any other in all the world, whether bedded in the hardware of the UN police or the so-called World Government. Whatever was said here remained here, consigned to the abyssal core of the Hidden Archive—but those who met here did not think of it as the conference chamber of the Secret Masters, the Gods of Olympus, or the Hardinist Cabal. It was merely a place where businessmen could meet and consider matters of mutual concern. It was just a room with bare walls and a rectangular table, devoid of all unnecessary ostentation, except a little extra polish.

“Thank you, Michael,” said the chairman. “All things considered, you did a good job. If you hadn’t taken the decision to follow Wilde, the police would certainly have tried—and might have contrived—to keep a little more from us than they actually did. It would have been annoying, to say the least, if we hadn’t been able to secure the equipment in that ingenious theater for our exclusive use. There are tricks we can actually use in that setup. They’re trivial tricks by comparison with what we’ll eventually learn from the girl and her lovely hair, but trivial tricks are often the most rewarding, in purely commercial terms.” “I wish the distractions had worked a little better,” Michael said, feeling that it was safe, in view of the chairman’s generosity, to indulge in a little judicious self-criticism. “I can’t help feeling that if only I’d framed my reckless hypotheses a little more cleverly, I might have persuaded Wilde to fall for one or other of them. He is a sucker for a good story, and it might have been better if he hadn’t been quite so accurate in his subsequent guesses.” “Wilde’s a fool,” opined a white-haired man who must have been two hundred and twenty if he were a day. “It doesn’t matter how accurate he is—no one will ever take his opinions seriously.” “Rightly so, Mr. Hart,” observed a female of equal apparent antiquity. “People know full well that it’s men like him who invent disparaging terms like vidveg, and they’re absolutely right to feel insulted. They’re correct in their estimation of him as a vain, patronizing poseur. Nobody watching the final act of that farce live identified with him—they all identified with the policewoman.